Barn Door Opens on Okie Cult Car

Farmers cause a tempest in a sake cup with their tiny used trucks.

December 2008 By AARON ROBINSON

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We’ve devoted part of this month’s issue to intriguing fuel-economy solutions. So, ladies and gents, I give you Oklahoma.

Yes, Oklahoma, Will Rogers’s famously horizontal birthplace and the golden buckle of the wheat belt where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain. In Oklahoma, only the harvest dominates conversation more than God, guns, and diesel pickups. Except that these days, with diesel running more than $4 per, folks are all a-gab about those little used mini-trucks, the ones that get 40 mpg with their itty-bitty three-cylinder engines. Some even have the dang steering wheel shoved over to the right side!

Federal regulators consider mini-trucks invasive pests from Asia, no better than the long-horned beetle or soybean rust. That’s because mini-trucks don’t come within a good hog call of meeting safety or emissions standards. In a 35-mph offset-barrier test, a mini-truck might just vaporize.

Well, Oklahoma’s farmers don’t mind the odd government subsidy, but they sure don’t want to be told what is and isn’t safe to drive into town, especially when 30 states allow adults on motorcycles without helmets and nobody in Washington says boo. In November, Oklahoma became the 10th state to allow registration and limited operation of mini-trucks on public roads. Arizona and Texas are also considering exceptions. Meanwhile, federal government lawyers are stone grinding their quills, and no one will be surprised if the whole kerfluffle lands in the Supreme Court.

The K is short for kei jidosha, Japanese for “light vehicle” and the name of a special class of minicars and mini-trucks subject to reduced taxation. Current Japanese regs limit the kei class to about 134 inches long and 58 inches wide, with engines no larger than 660cc and no more powerful than 65 horsepower. The heaviest weigh about 2200 pounds. Mini-trucks can come with four-wheel drive and a variety of bed configurations and ag accessories. Unlike comparable ATVs such as the $11,000 Yamaha Rhino, mini-trucks have enclosed cabs with heat and air conditioning. They can trot up to 65 mph, and thanks to Japan’s tax code, which penalizes aging vehicles, the trucks are usually plucked plumb and healthy out of the Honshu rice paddies with fewer than 50,000 miles on them. They are stacked like dominoes into sea containers and within a few weeks are doing the limbo under America’s rigid vehicle-import barrier as used farm equipment. They can be hauling hay in a panhandle horse paddock for as little as $5000 delivered.

Josh Collins lives on a 17.5-acre ranch in Claremore, Oklahoma. Before buying his 1999 Subaru Sambar 4x4 for $7800, he got about 15 mpg on runs into town with his Dodge Ram 3500.

“Despite my Dodge’s 3600-pound payload capacity,” says Collins, “90 percent of the time I rarely haul more than 600 pounds in the bed for these errands into town. A mini-truck’s payload capacity ranges from 775 pounds to 1200 pounds, depending on the brand and model.” Collins also likes that his 1800-pound Subaru (with about 50K miles on it) practically floats across a pasture without leaving ruts. Nowadays, the Dodge only tows horse trailers.

“They’re like those European Smart cars, but Okie style,” says Oklahoma GOP state rep Don Armes, who coauthored the state’s legalization bill. “We’ll always have big pickups, but we don’t need to drive them every day. If I can do what I need to in that little buggy getting 40 mpg, that’s real savings.”

Is it me, or does the planet feel just a tiny bit cooler?

Rae Tyson, a spokesman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, says mini-trucks are in the agency’s bombsights. “The federal government has the responsibility to make sure that vehicles operated on public roads are safe,” he says. “Currently we have the lowest vehicle fatality rates in history. It would be counterproductive to head in the wrong direction for the sake of a couple of miles per gallon.”

Well, it’s more than a couple, but what’s the difference? Federal regulatory pre­eminence is threatened. One D.C. bureaucrat told me privately that state governors “may soon get reminded of where their authority ends and begins.”

Are mini-trucks dangerous? No one has statistics. Subject to Canada’s looser import rules, British Columbia produced a 2007 study showing that older right-hand-drive vehicles in Canada are 40 percent more likely to crash compared with similar left-drive vehicles. The study doesn’t break out mini-trucks—Canada is awash in used Japan-market vehicles of all sizes—or say how many crashes produced injuries or just wrinkled fenders. Indeed, no one I spoke with even knows how many mini-trucks are in North America.

Tired of having their pockets picked by high fuel prices, Oklahomans aren’t waiting around for somebody else to fix their ­wagons. A federal government that sanctions blithering irresponsibility—­helmets, remember—seems a trifle ridiculous when trying to save us from the peril of 40-mpg trucklets with seatbelts and, in later models, airbags. Representative Armes says the feds “may whine about it, but my response is, ‘Okay, show me a better idea. Show me something that answers this fuel question.’?”